Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  “What time was that?”

  “About seven thirty.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. But I was at a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum that began at eight. I can give you a list of people who saw me there. Does that help at all?”

  Abbie had been alive at 8. She called down for room service after that. She was killed sometime between 10 and midnight. Of course, Beverly could have gone back for a second time and done it, I suppose. But I didn’t think that was what happened anymore. Just talking to her, I realized that wasn’t her style. The only person she’d ever killed was her own daughter. Maybe not literally killed her, but she was the reason Laura wound up in that alley outside the Regent and pulled the trigger of the gun to her head. The law couldn’t do anything about that, of course. Still, the woman would have to answer to a higher authority someday.

  There was one more thing though.

  Something I was pretty sure she still didn’t know.

  She said Abbie had told her everything, the same way I had—about the suicide, the affair with Rizzo, and putting the baby they had up for adoption. But I’d left one thing out. I realized now Abbie must have too. She’d asked Beverly to be on her next show. That’s when she was going to spring it on her. It would have been a complete surprise. The ultimate confrontational moment in reality TV.

  “When you met Abbie,” I asked, “was there anything about her that seemed familiar to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she remind you of anybody?”

  “She was very beautiful.”

  “Abbie should have been beautiful. Her mother was beautiful too.”

  She looked confused.

  “After you gave up Laura’s baby for adoption, it wound up with a family in Wisconsin. A plain-looking couple, nothing like Laura, but they were good parents. Their names were Ronald and Elizabeth Kincaid.”

  She still didn’t get it.

  “Abbie was your granddaughter,” I said.

  I left her like that. I don’t know what happened afterward. Maybe she was overcome by grief as she realized that her last living link to her daughter—her own granddaughter—was dead now too. More likely, she was already figuring out how to make it work for her. Abbie was her granddaughter. Abbie was famous too. Not as famous as Laura had been, but maybe she would be before it was all over. She died tragically trying to unravel the mysteries of her movie star mother’s legend. I could already imagine the wheels turning in Beverly’s head as she tried to figure out all the ways she could make money off of this death too.

  By the time I walked out the door her building, it was nearly 11 p.m. I stood there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do next. I’d found out a lot of things, including the truth about what happened to Laura Marlowe. But the story wasn’t over yet. I still didn’t know who killed Abbie. If Bill Remesch, Edward Holloway, or Beverly Makofsky weren’t Abbie’s killer, then who was? I was at a dead end. I was all out of suspects.

  Except I’d forgotten about one.

  “You’re never going to write this story,” a voice said from behind me.

  I turned around.

  It was Tommy Rizzo Jr.

  He had that same look of fury on his face as he did that first time I’d seen him at Abbie’s studio.

  Only this time he was holding a gun.

  PART SIX

  ONCE UPON A TIME FOREVER

  Chapter 49

  ABBIE always thought you were harmless,” I said.

  “Everyone thinks I’m harmless.”

  “She was your sister.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you know she was your sister when you killed her?”

  “That’s why I killed her.”

  There was no one around us. It was late, and the street on Fifth Avenue outside the apartment house of Laura’s mother was pretty much empty. Rizzo moved close to me and I felt the barrel of the gun in my side. He laid a newspaper over it so that no one could see what was going on even if someone did pass by us. He told me to start walking. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I did.

  “Why?” I asked him as we moved south down Fifth Avenue. “You at least owe me an explanation.”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like being Thomas Rizzo’s son? All my life, I tried to distance myself from his world. But it never did any good. Everybody still thought of me as the mobster’s kid. No matter what I did, that label was always with me. And, by not following him into the family business, if you want to call it that, I alienated myself from him. I was still his son. But that was it. There was no love there, no respect—he had disdain for me and everything I tried to do. I was a joke to everybody.

  “I tried, I really tried to do something to impress him. But everything always went wrong. I went to a good college. I made the Dean’s List. Later, I found out I got accepted at the school because my father had paid off people on the admissions board. He paid off professors too; that’s why I got such good grades. He wanted everyone to think I was this great scholar. Even my real estate business was built on his money. He never let me forget any of that. My son is so noble, he used to say—he doesn’t want to dirty his hands in my business—but he’ll take my money. I just wanted to do something right once in my life. To make him proud of me.

  “That’s why I started seeing Abbie. My father seemed fascinated with her. He was always talking about this beautiful and talented woman on TV. If I had someone like that as my girlfriend, I thought maybe he would see me in a different way. Maybe he’d finally respect me. So I figured out a way to meet her, and we hit it off pretty well at the beginning. We went out on a few dates, and she seemed to like me. But then it all ended. Abbie broke it off. She said I was a nice guy, but she couldn’t see me anymore. I didn’t understand what had happened to change her so much overnight.”

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Thomas Rizzo Sr. had told her the truth. Rizzo was her real father. That meant Tommy Jr. was her half-brother. She didn’t tell him that right away, of course. She was probably saving it for her show. But she knew she couldn’t keep seeing him anymore. So she made up some excuse to break up with him.

  “My father finally told me,” Rizzo said. “I’d gone to him out of desperation and said I didn’t understand why Abbie had stopped seeing me. He just started to laugh. He was laughing at me. He told me I couldn’t do anything right. Of all the women in the world, I fell head over heels in love with my own sister, he said. He said I’d always been a loser. That he was embarrassed to have someone like me as his son.

  “He said as soon as he found out I was seeing Abbie, he reached out to her and told her the truth. He even asked me if I had slept with her, can you believe that? I said no, we hadn’t gotten to that point in the relationship yet. He seemed very relieved about that. He said he was just glad he found out in time so he could put a stop to it.

  “He told me Abbie was the kind of child that should have been his. That she was smart and tough and he could see her mother in her. He told me he should have stayed with Laura Marlowe, but he didn’t because of me. He said he’d given up the love of his life out of some stupid feeling of loyalty and duty to his family. Now his family was Abbie, he said. He was going to make her an even bigger star than she was now, even bigger than her mother had been. He said she was everything that I wasn’t. And here I was mooning over her pathetically like some lovesick puppy. All the anger, all the frustration that had been building between us over the years seemed to come bursting out at that moment.

  “Then Abbie called and said she was at the hotel. She said she was going to put the whole thing on the air. She wanted me to come on the show for an interview too. I didn’t know what to do. All I kept thinking about was that I couldn’t let our relationship become public knowledge. If people knew I’d fallen in love with
my own sister, I would be a laughingstock for the rest of my life. Not just with my father. With the whole world. I just couldn’t live with that kind of humiliation.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted to scare her. I begged her not to do this. But she laughed. She laughed at me, the same way my father had laughed at me. The way people have always laughed at me. Something just snapped inside of me. I pointed the gun at her. She was scared now, and I liked that. It made me feel good that she was afraid of me. She asked me to put the gun down. She promised not to run the story. But I didn’t believe her. I knew she would. I knew her well enough to know that she could never not go through with a story that good. That’s when I killed her.”

  Rizzo told me to stop walking, that we were where we were going. I looked around. We were standing in front of the Regent Hotel, which was only a few blocks from Beverly Richmond’s building. Laura Marlowe had died at this hotel. So did her daughter Abbie. I had a pretty good idea what Rizzo had in mind next.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I do. Once I found out you’d been to see my father, I realized it was just a matter of time until you’d figured it all out. Now that you know, you have to die too. Just like Abbie. I couldn’t let her run this story, and I can’t let you do it either.”

  “Why here?” I asked, stalling for time in hope someone would see him holding the gun on me and call the cops.

  “It provides a nice sense of closure. Besides, people will say it had something to do with Laura Marlowe’s death and Abbie’s. You’ll be part of the legend. The reporter who died trying to solve the mystery. There’s sort of a Bermuda Triangle aspect to the whole thing, don’t you think? They’ll be talking about you for years. Laura Marlowe, Abbie Kincaid, and Gil Malloy. But no one will ever link it to me.”

  He motioned for me to walk down the alley next to the Regent. The same alley where Laura had died. We went about thirty feet into the alley. Now, even if someone passed by, there was no way anyone could see us. Just to make sure, he had me walk down some steps toward a basement door. We were completely out of sight now.

  “What about Remesch?” I asked him. “How did all that evidence of Abbie’s murder wind up in his place in Wisconsin? Did you set him up?”

  “I learned from the best,” he smiled. “My father. It wasn’t hard to fly up there, plant the gun, and then wait for the law to show up. It gave me a real sense of accomplishment when he was arrested for the murder.”

  He wanted to tell the story. He wanted someone to listen to him. Even if it was someone who would be dead in a few minutes. All his life no one had listened to him. I heard a police siren in the distance. For a second, it gave me a surge of hope. But then it quickly passed. There was no other sound. We were alone, and I needed a miracle if I was ever going to get out of this alive. I didn’t want to become part of the Laura Marlowe legend. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for me.

  “Tommy, you’re not really a killer,” I said.

  “The thing is I kind of liked it,” he smiled. “All those years growing up with my father, I guess I always wondered what it was like to kill someone. Now I know. It gave me a feeling of power that I never had before. My father’s dying, and I will get everything from him. The money, the business, and the power—if I want it. I never thought I did. But now I realize that everything’s working out perfectly for me. I’m not going to be a joke anymore. I’m going to be the man, just like my father. Killing Abbie was the best thing I ever did. Now there’s just this one more little thing I have to finish.”

  He pointed the gun at my chest.

  “Drop the weapon,” a voice said.

  I looked up and saw him standing there at the top of the stairs.

  I’d been hoping for a miracle.

  Waiting for someone to show up and rescue me.

  This wasn’t the person I expected.

  But I was sure glad to see him.

  “Just put the gun down now, Tommy,” Marlboro Man said, except he wasn’t smoking a cigarette this time. He was all business. “I’ve known you for a long time, and I’m trying to give you a break. But you’re making it damn hard for me. You screwed up, kid. You screwed up real bad.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Rizzo said.

  He still had the gun pointed at me.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Why are you here anyway?”

  “Your father sent me.”

  “To do what?”

  “Clean up your mess, kid. He’s always cleaning up your messes. Now I gotta do it one more time.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me. I’m Thomas Rizzo’s son.”

  “Abbie was his daughter.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “He’s very upset about her death.”

  “The old man is dying. He’ll be gone soon. I’ll take over everything then. I’ll be your boss. We can make a deal.”

  “No deal, kid.”

  “All we have to do is get rid of this reporter. Then no one will ever know. I’ll have my father’s money, my father’s power. I’ll be the man.”

  “Drop the gun, Tommy.”

  Suddenly, Rizzo whirled around and started firing.

  I dived for cover behind a trash canister just as the first shots rang out.

  It was really no contest. Rizzo was scared; he’d never been in a spot like this before. But not Marlboro Man. He wasn’t scared at all. This was his profession.

  He killed Tommy Rizzo with a single shot to the head.

  Chapter 50

  HIS name is James Kilgore,” I said.

  “Who?” Dr. Barbara Landis asked.

  “The Marlboro Man.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “I asked him.”

  “After he shot Tommy Rizzo to death?”

  “Yes, I just thought it was important to know.”

  Dr. Landis was the psychiatrist I’d seen in the past to help me deal with my anxiety attacks and the underlying problems in my life—as she put it—that caused me to have the anxiety. I hadn’t been to see her in weeks. Well, actually it was more like months. I figured she’d be upset about my long absence. Maybe yell at me or lecture me for not keeping up with my treatment. But she just started talking with me as if we’d left off at a previous session the day before.

  “What else did you say to this Kilgore person?”

  “I asked him why he did it. He said Thomas Rizzo’s last wish, the one thing he wanted to happen before he died, was to find out who murdered his daughter, Abbie, and kill them. So that’s what Kilgore did.”

  “Even if it turned out to be Rizzo’s own son?”

  “I think maybe Rizzo knew it was going to turn out that way, but he kept hoping against hope he was wrong. Anyway, Kilgore followed me on the theory that I might eventually lead him to the killer. I never had a clue he was right there behind me. Unlike me, he really knew how to follow somebody. Once he heard Tommy’s confession to me, that was all he needed. I don’t know if he faced any kind of a moral dilemma over killing his boss’s son. I don’t think he did. I think he had his orders, and he followed them. I understand that. I respect that.”

  “You respect the principles of a man who probably has killed a great number of people?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than you respect the principles of Edward Holloway or Laura’s mother—neither of whom, as it turned out, ever killed anybody?”

  “I have a very complicated set of principles,” I said.

  * * *

  After Kilgore shot Tommy Rizzo that night outside the Regent, I wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. The easy thing would have been to kill me too. That way there was no witness to tie him to the crime. I had no doubt he would have done that if Rizzo had ordered it. But that wasn’t part of the deal.
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  He’d asked me—not told me—if I would leave him out of it when the cops came and got my story. If I would tell them I’d never seen the shooter before.

  “And that’s what you did?” Dr. Landis asked.

  “Yes, I said Rizzo had confessed Abbie’s killing to me. I said someone shot him afterward and then fled. I said I had no idea who that was. Just to throw the police off the trail a little more, I speculated that it was one of Thomas Rizzo’s mob rivals who took out his anger on Rizzo’s son. I said I assumed it had nothing to do with the Abbie or Laura Marlowe stories. The cops weren’t that upset. They had my testimony about Rizzo’s confession, which was enough. Plus more evidence they found once they went back and rechecked everything about Tommy and his movements that night. Anyway, they’d never have to prove it in a court of law since Rizzo was dead. They could close the books on Abbie’s murder. Remesch was released from prison, and everybody’s going to live happily ever after.”

  “And you never wrote about Kilgore or Thomas Rizzo Sr.’s role in saving your life in any of your stories?”

  “No.”

  “Or told anyone about this—even your editor at the paper?”

  I shook my head no.

  “So why are you telling me now?”

  “I have to talk to someone about it.”

  “Still there must be other people you know . . .”

  “Someone I could trust.”

  “Are you saying that I’m the only person in your life right now that you feel you can completely trust?”

  “Yeah, whatever . . .”

  * * *

  I told her about all the personal stuff that had been going on with me since my last visit there. About Susan suddenly getting married to someone else. About Abbie Kincaid and the short time we’d spent together before she was killed. And about my just-ended relationship with Sherry DeConde.